8 out of 8 people found this review helpful.
ATC-2K review
Date of Review: May 15, 2007
The Bottom Line: For this price and quality this is a must have-buy buy buy!
I bought the ATC-2K when it first came out. Been using it for a few months now.
The feature I like best is that it's so compact and there are no wires. With the other helmet cam setups I had wires pulling my head and sometimes getting caught up, not to mention a camcorder in my rucksack!
I film on the highest resolution and highest frame rate. That is, 640 x 480 VGA and 30 FPS. On my 2GB SD card that gives me about an hours worth of recording. The batteries last for about 1 and a half to 2 hours flat out.
That's another thing I like, with this camera, when either the battery (2 x AA) or memory runs out I can just change the SD card or change the battery. Simple.
For playback, the ATC-2K comes with an RCA cable for the TV and USB cable for the computer. I mainly use the computer for playback but the RCA cable came in handy when I went traveling and didn't have computer access.
I used the ATC-2K for a number of activities including bungee, skydiving, snowboarding and Go-Karting. I have to say the video quality is pretty good for something this size. The skydive clips I got were amazing, really clear. The Go Karting got some great over-take shots, spin offs and crashes. I changed the view of the ATC-2K each time I went Go-Karting, did bumper cam, helmet (POV) cam and chase cam. I'd say the bumper cam came out with the best shots overall. For the bungee jumping, I mounted the camera to my left leg on the harness. There's a great opening shot of my shoe, the ledge then the drop below!
Durability: the ATC-2K has a rubberized layer on the outside, my camera has taken quite a few knocks without any problems. I've tapped it, hit it and it hasn't stopped recording. When Go-Karting, I had a couple of hard crashes, no problem for the ATC-2K. To the more extreme, I've seen clips of the ATC-2K on YouTube mounted to RC cars, home made rockets (yes rockets) and seen mountain biking wipeouts. The clips are great!
Whenever I buy a product I usually skim through the manual on the bus back home. So for all you people who don't, here's what I found out:
The camera is waterproof up to 10 ft but make sure you have applied the silicon grease to the O-rings before submerging it.
When using the ATC-2K in cold weather you should change from alkaline to lithium batteries (it seems Oregon Scientific also have a cold weather pouch coming soon).
When you insert the SD card, you need to flip the card first so the pins are up and label is down. The SD card has to be formatted to FAT in order to work properly with the ATC-2K. I put mine into my camera, right clicked and pressed format, pretty simple.
So for 99 quid, the ATC-2K is well worth the money. If you asked me whether or not you should buy it, one answer-YEAH BABY!!!!.
